An Observed Lack of Substructure in Starless Cores II: Super-Jeans Cores

Abstract

We present SMA and CARMA continuum and spectral line observations of five dense cores located in the Perseus and Ophiuchus molecular clouds whose masses exceed their thermal Jeans masses. Three of these cores have previously been identified as being starless and two have been classified as being possibly protostellar. We find that one core is certainly protostellar. The other four cores, however, are starless and undetected in both C18O (2-1) and 1.3mm continuum emission. These four starless cores have flat density profiles out to at least 0.006 pc, which is typical for starless cores in general. Density profiles predicted by some collapse models, especially in the early stages of infall, are consistent with our observations. Archival data reveal that these starless cores have significant non-thermal support against collapse, although they may still be unstable.

18 pages including 5 pages of figures, accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (5)

• The SCUBA Legacy Catalogue: Continuum Objects Detected by SCUBA
• Observing the gas temperature drop in the high-density nucleus of L 1544
• An Ammonia Spectral Atlas of Dense Cores in Perseus
• The Spitzer Gould Belt Survey of Large Nearby Interstellar Clouds: Discovery of a Dense Embedded Cluster in the Serpens-Aquila Rift
• BIMA N2H+ 1-0 mapping observations of L183 -- fragmentation and spin-up in a collapsing, magnetized, rotating, pre-stellar core

Cited by in corpus (14)

• The VLA Nascent Disk and Multiplicity Survey of Perseus Protostars (VANDAM). II. Multiplicity of Protostars in the Perseus Molecular Cloud
• CARMA observations of protostellar outflows in NGC 1333
• A Sub-arcsecond Survey Toward Class 0 Protostars in Perseus: Searching for Signatures of Protostellar Disks
• Observations of Infalling and Rotational Motions on a 1,000-AU Scale around 17 Class 0 and 0/I Protostars: Hints of Disk Growth and Magnetic Braking?
• The central 1000 AU of a pre-stellar core revealed with ALMA. I. 1.3 mm continuum observations
• Chronology of Episodic Accretion in Protostars -- an ALMA survey of the CO and H${}_2$O snowlines
• The VLA Nascent Disk And Multiplicity (VANDAM) Survey of Perseus Protostars. Resolving the Sub-Arcsecond Binary System in NGC 1333 IRAS2A
• Revealing H2D+ depletion and compact structure in starless and protostellar cores with ALMA
• ALMA Survey of Orion Planck Galactic Cold Clumps (ALMASOP): Detection of extremely high density compact structure of prestellar cores and multiple substructures within
• Substellar-Mass Condensations in Prestellar Cores
• Synthetic Observations of the Evolution of Starless Cores in a Molecular Cloud Simulation: Comparisons with JCMT Data and Predictions for ALMA
• The evolutionary status of dense cores in the NGC 1333 IRAS 4 region
• Seeds of Life in Space (SOLIS).VII. Discovery of a cold dense methanol blob toward the L1521F VeLLO system
• Mapping the H${}_2$D${}^{+}$ and N${}_2$H${}^{+}$ emission towards prestellar cores. Testing dynamical models of the collapse using gas tracers